


What Lies Beyond The Garden Fence

by sufferingpostpotterdepression



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Gen, Growing Up, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-29
Updated: 2014-03-29
Packaged: 2018-01-17 11:59:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1386829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sufferingpostpotterdepression/pseuds/sufferingpostpotterdepression
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When they had moved to the countryside, Harry had only been five, and his older sister Gemma had told him that he must never, ever, go further than the fence at the end of their garden.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Lies Beyond The Garden Fence

When they had moved to the countryside, Harry had only been five, and his older sister Gemma had told him that he must never, ever, go further than the fence at the end of their garden.   
At first, Harry didn’t mind, because their garden was massive compared to the house they used to live in, and there was a football goal and a swimming pool and a swing and a climbing frame and a treehouse, so why would he ever want to go further than the garden? Harry had a playground fit for a prince and an imagination to match, and so he didn’t stray.   
Then, when Harry turned eight, and he didn’t want to stay in the garden, Gemma repeated her message more anxiously, and so Harry went out with his friends from his posh private school and they explored the woods and went to the park or, on one occasion, rode miniature quad bikes through the fields behind his friend Liam’s house. His parents called it ‘the estate’, but Liam just called it ‘the garden’.   
When Harry was eleven, his mum’s new boyfriend bought him an X-Box. So, for the most part, he abandoned the garden, because why play real football when you can play football on a computer. So he sat inside in the ‘games room’, and spoke to his friends via a headset. This continued throughout Harry’s teenage years, the marking of time coming with the occasional breaks to study for exams and the changes in console, always needing the newest and the best.   
They could afford it, so it wasn’t a problem, but when they’d bought the house, one of it’s main attractions had been the beautiful gardens, which had now been left abandoned. With the gardener coming in weekly, they were pristine, but there was no human life amongst the vibrant flowers.   
So Harry’s mum made a decision, and they had the builders in and they extended the swimming pool, and they built a pool house at the far end of the garden, backing onto the fence. And then, when it was complete and Harry was seventeen and Gemma came home from university for his birthday, she repeated what she’d said to him before. Never go beyond the garden fence, Harry. And after she’d said it, she’d cried, but no-one had seen.   
So Harry had his friends Niall, Liam and Zayn over, and they slept in the pool house and ordered takeaway pizza and swum naked and laughing in the middle of the night, and Harry tried not to think about what Gemma had said.   
After the celebrations, Harry tidied away the pizza boxes, and then he went to his room, and he studied for his A Levels. And he passed his A Levels and he went to university and then he moved out. And not long after, Harry’s mum divorced from the man who had bought Harry his first X-Box, and she moved back into a smaller house in the city, because she had no children to maintain a garden for in the hope they might return to it one day.  
And so Harry never went past the garden fence. But if he had, he’d have found, wedged into a gap between two branches, a letter that a concerned sister had promised to secretly pass on. A letter from an old friend relying on the inappropriate curiosity of a five year old boy to instinctively do what he was told not to.   
It was a letter from a best friend who no-one approved of, and so everyone had encouraged Harry to forget when he was only five years old, but a friend who’d cried for the first time when he found out Harry was moving away, and it was a letter from Louis.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still doing writing exercises from writingexercises.co.uk if you're interested, hence this. It wasn't really supposed to be sad but it tuned out that way, sorry. And I'm also sorry that not much really happens... If you want something more interesting then send me (or comment with) writing prompts; I'm really bored. xx


End file.
